


wistera & city traffic

by sunshineandthunderstorms (Chill_with_Penguins)



Series: a bouquet of weeds [2]
Category: Original Work, Poetry - Fandom
Genre: (there shouldn't be much tho this is mostly just my boring life), Multi, each work in this series is part of the same "book of poems", just with a different theme, more original poetry, tags to be added as anything triggering pops up, this will be slowly added to over time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:01:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27798895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chill_with_Penguins/pseuds/sunshineandthunderstorms
Summary: a place for the hurt, the angry, and the vaguely melancholy
Series: a bouquet of weeds [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2033836





	wistera & city traffic

**Author's Note:**

> Written in Janurary 2020 while sitting in the library basement, decidedly Not Doing my assignment

my mother's great-grandparents left their home with nothing but a kitchen table.

that sounds kind of like the start to a joke, but it's not--or rather

maybe it is, maybe all of life

is one big joke.

my ancestors left poland with nothing but a kitchen table.

they immigrated to canada.

the punchline: my family lives in south carolina, half a continent

away from any other relatives.

_cue laughter_

my ancestors left their home with nothing but a kitchen table &

they settled someplace cold and snowy & i'd like to say

i can claim some kind of heritage, but i've never even

met them. i cannot picture their faces, these people

who granted me life.

(a complete list

of everything i know about my great-great-grandparents:

1\. they moved from poland to canada

2\. they took only their kitchen table)

somewhere along the way, they had kids, i suppose. then their kids

had kids, because that's what happens, because

that's how the world keeps turning. their kids' kids' kids' and so on and so forth, until you wind up

with a bitter grandmother i see once every two years, until you end up

in america, not sure what your citizenship is, not sure

if there's anything left of that story for you to claim with soft & grubby palms.

(in another world, this would be a poem about

how i grew up around that kitchen table, running

in and out of its legs, its worn wood rough against my fingers like a jungle cat

or an old friend.)

(this is not that world. i've never seen

the table;

the other side took it long before my mom could've.)

my ancestors left their home and somehow this story ends with me--

no. that's not true. this story

doesn't end.

but here i sit, muscles tense against hard plastic, operating on

too little sleep and too many ambitions. i have dreams that are coming true, dreams about

leaving my home and venturing far away and

about building something new and unblemished for myself, and still

always

i wonder if this wanderlust is inherited, if my great-great-grandparents were running toward

or fleeing from.

i've never stepped foot in canada, but my gut

tugs me north, a compass needle

wavering in the warmth of a cupped hand & maybe i & my family are nothing more than birds

who forgot the second part of the migration, self-exiled to a land

of frivolousness and palm trees.

the story doesn't end but right now i am sitting in a library basement,

reading about people who held their people close and didn't

unclench their fingers even when the cold

bit angrily at their knuckles and the foreign speech

buzzed around their ears,

a hornet's nest freshly kicked.

the story doesn't end but i can't help but think about how

i grew up the other half of a girl whose parents came from china, who

let me into their house and taught me what it means to mend clothes when you have no other option, to eat everything,

( _yes even the eyeballs, don't make that face)_

because sometimes you don't know when the next meal will be.

i think about so many foods i never learned to appreciate, about text chains

half in english and half in mandarin characters that sprawl like cats in the sun, about

the way pinyin fit heavy and clumsy in my mouth;

there's a growing collection of family recipes that clutter the pages of my notebook but

none of them are mine.

my grandparents came with nothing but the kitchen table & i wonder

what it means to be a bird that never flew back north,

to be a girl

with no past


End file.
